25 Songs, 3 Reasons: Why “one-off spectaculars” are good for the web
Last week, the New York Times published a piece about the 25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going. It’s the kind of piece that a lot of design and code purists have deemed bad for the web: more artefact than article, existing in its own little universe. But I instantly liked it. It’s simple and sublime at the same time. And it reminded me of why such pieces can in fact contribute to a better web.
More Snow Fall or less Snow Fall?
It’s been more than three years now since the same New York Times published Snow Fall, an article on the 2012 avalanche in Tunnel Creek, full of stunning footage, 360° video and infographics, and then-cutting-edge web technology.
Not only did that piece take a natural disaster to rare prominence, it also defined a new category of Internet. “Interactives” and “digital storytelling” went on to become the seasonal buzzwords, hot property for creative agencies and the subject of many a think-piece alike. Finally, marketers and bloggers raved in unison, here was someone tapping the full potential of the web and telling a story in a way that was truly unique to the digital space.
Others were not so euphoric. Interactives of this type, they said, were cluttering the web with their excessive use of decorative video and showcase-like display of technology. What looked like innovation on first sight was in fact a huge step back — a b2b exhibition of shallow hat-tricks slowing down the web for no real benefit, and ignoring the realities of an overwhelming majority of users. And, hey, who had actually READ Snow Fall after all?
Regardless of which side you were one (or are on, for that matter — the discussion outlined above is probably being had in a meeting room somewhere in the world right now) Snow Fall became one of biggest clichés of the all-Internet-everything era. Interactive. Immersive. Engaging. You name it. If you are an agency type who’s in the business of selling branded content to those who can afford it, you probably still love Snow Fall. If you are a proud owner of a Medium account, you probably started to hate it at some point. Bloated, incompatible, vain, short-lived, pointless, dangerous.
25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going clearly falls into this category of interactive. The piece comes with its own design touches outside the usual NYT framework, a variety of scrolling effects, and two VR videos to enhance the linear reading experience. Even more so, it passingly gave this type of article a new category name — the subheader called it a “one-off spectacular”.
“One-off spectacular” is an excellent name
Much like most of the reporting and visuals in the piece, this category name is excellent. It’s excellent not just because “interactive” is so stupid (Ever seen a non-interactive website?). It’s excellent because it highlights two essential points that are usually overlooked when the repercussions of these types of articles — New York Mag’s One Block, Bloomberg’s What Is Code, The Intercept’s The Drone Paper, you name it — are discussed.
They are one-offs in that they are presents exceptions to a valuable rule, Gönnungen as we say around here. They are not meant to be suggestions for the future of the web, more like guilty pleasures: the one time a year you go to McDonald’s.
They are also spectacles in that they are designed to be more than what’s useful. The bells and whistles are part of the concept, and pointing out that they are just bells and whistles misses the point. To say that the whole web should be like Snow Fall is to say that every building should be like the Eiffel Tower. But was it really that bad of an idea to build the Eiffel Tower?
For designers, one-off spectaculars can be an inspiration in the truest sense of the word: not so much a reference point but a creative impulse.
For developers, they can be an opportunity to shine and get credit from a broader audience that don’t care about technical details and code quality as long as their favourite app “works”.
And for the publishing business — a business that’s still struggling to find new sustainable business models amid a truly historic shift — they can generate some much-needed revenue.
A business opportunity for digital publishers
That’s of paramount importance. If we want media businesses to partake and invest in the evolution of the web; if we want to avoid a world in which consumer brands are the only institutions that can afford to pay writers, photographers, and illustrators; if we want to read, watch, hear great journalistic work, then money will have to be put into the system.
For many years, the predominant business model for digital publishers was to produce as many page views as possible with the least investment. If you can sell views to advertisers by the piece, you want to make sure you spend as little money as possible on producing one view. It’s like selling t-shirts or fried chicken, with slightly different ethical implications: make sure to keep your costs low and your production scalable. Or, in other words, don’t make one-off spectaculars.
With the constant demise of display ads over the past years, page views have become a far less relevant metric. If you can’t directly monetize the fact that people have opened one of your pages, simply focusing on keeping costs per click low won’t do the trick. Page views are great but they are not the end goal anymore. Other sources of revenue have become increasingly important for publishers: native advertisement, subscriptions and micro payments — and one-off spectaculars can play a significant role in each field.
1. One-off spectaculars lend themselves to micro payments.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of micro payments in online journalism, check out Blendle. The Dutch service lets publishers sell access to individual articles. To prevent click-bait, users can claim their money back if they don’t like what they’ve purchased. In a nutshell, it’s the attempt to establish iTunes in a world dominated by Spotify, just more promising: “People do spend money on background pieces”, co-founder Alexander Klöpping explains in a blog post about the company’s first year. “Great analysis. Opinion pieces. Long interviews. Stuff like that.”
Blendle is soon to launch in the US, with the New York Times and the Washington Post amongst the first publishers to sign up for the closed beta. It currently doesn’t support one-off spectaculars. But you can easily imagine the opportunity — just think of people who used to buy or still buy printed magazines because they look dope.
As of today, 25 Songs has been shared 5,824 times on Facebook. (For comparison, the Times’ review of the 2016 Grammy Awards was shared 185 times, and a much-noted thinkpiece on Kanye West’s work-in-progress hit album, The Life of Pablo was shared 161 times.) Even if you subtract all the usual creative types who posted this with the sole purpose of demonstrating how in touch they are with the latest and greatest, it’s pretty evident that, contrary to some critics’ belief, these pieces are not just made for the their makers’ egos. People care. People even care to let their friends know about it—a currency that’s much more valuable than the average ¢99 publishers charge for an article on Blendle.
2. One-off spectaculars can boost subscriptions.
Paid online subscriptions are on a slow but steady rise and have become a notable business, for many publishing houses, including the traditional bigwigs. Last summer the New York Times announced with much fanfare that they now have more than one million digital subscribers. In general, this is encouraging. But the competition is fierce. Most readers are unlikely to pay for more than one news source, so that means you have to give them something to pick you. This is a much established pattern amongst TV/movie and, increasingly, music streaming services (even though there’s little reason to believe that music will find much success in this model in the long run). In that sense, 25 Songs is like football for 90s pay TV or House of Cards for Netflix.
In fact, it’s much more like the Google Cardboard VR viewers that the New York Times gave away than the Grammy recap or Kanye review mentioned above. It’s a measure in brand building and customer acquisition, just as much as it is an exercises in innovative reporting and design. They are not what will impact a New York Times subscriber’s life the most. But they might well be the reason why they signed up in the first place.
3. One-off spectaculars are interesting for advertisers.
They are what comes closest to a full-page ad or a TV commercial if that is what you have been doing for the better part of your life. They are flashy. They shout ‘innovative’. They feel like value for money. (Side note: They also work extraordinarily well in internal presentations to “the client” and “the board”, but that’s probably just me being cynical.) The Wall Street Journal explainer-spectacular Cocainenomics, commissioned by Netflix from the Journal’s in-house creative agency WSJ Custom Studios to promote the launch of Narcos, is a popular and good example here. No idea if it sold Netflix any subscriptions. But it sure gave the WSJ a good case and some decent $$$.
Which brings us to why a lot of Internet people like us really hate one-off spectaculars. Because they are held in high regard by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. And because a lot of them are spectacularly bad: editorially pointless and executed poorly. Fair enough. But if the web was a bit more like 25 Songs we could all benefit from it.
